


A World Alone

by wearethefoxes



Series: the game is not played alone [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Artist Derek, Derek Feels, Derek Has Issues, Derek and Laura are Twins, F/M, M/M, Past Kate Argent/Derek Hale, Popular Stiles Stilinski, derek's family is tense, erica and derek are bros, his eyebrows are two of them tbh, his scowl is another, this is not all silliness because i'm terrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 19:10:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4071328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearethefoxes/pseuds/wearethefoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles Stilinski is doing something stupid again.</p><p>At this point, Derek isn't surprised. If he's not pulling some stupid prank on Coach that's going to get him in trouble, he's being dared to run naked through the halls during passing periods, or, as the current situation seems to be, see how many of the school's sausage patties he can fit into his mouth at once.</p><p>And doing it.</p><p>He has probably five in there at the moment - which is impressive considering their unyielding, hockey puck-like texture - and his friends are laughing loudly as he tries unsuccessfully to stuff another one in. Scott looks like he's going to need to pull out his inhaler any time, and even Lydia is laughing, albeit rolling her eyes when Stiles looks at her.</p><p>It's a little ridiculous, to be honest. He voted for Stiles on student council over Danny Mahealani - responsible, funny, level-headed Danny Mahealani - and he'd like to avoid him choking on mystery-meat patties in the middle of lunch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A World Alone

**Author's Note:**

> My longer fic was stressing me out and this has been bouncing around in my head for a while, so I figured, why the fuck not.  
> I legit wrote this in a night so if there are any typos or something doesn't make sense, feel free to point them out.

Stiles Stilinski is doing something stupid again.

At this point, Derek isn't surprised. If he's not pulling some stupid prank on Coach that's going to get him in trouble, he's being dared to run naked through the halls during passing periods, or, as the current situation seems to be, see how many of the school's sausage patties he can fit into his mouth at once.

And doing it.

He has probably five in there at the moment - which is impressive considering their unyielding, hockey puck-like texture - and his friends are laughing loudly as he tries unsuccessfully to stuff another one in. Scott looks like he's going to need to pull out his inhaler any time, and even Lydia is laughing, albeit rolling her eyes when Stiles looks at her.

It's a little ridiculous, to be honest. He voted for Stiles on student council over  _Danny Mahealani -_ responsible, funny, level-headed Danny Mahealani - and he'd like to avoid him choking on mystery-meat patties in the middle of lunch.

Just then, Stiles looks up and around and meets Derek's eyes. He's smiling, his mouth open around the patties, he's got ketchup on his face, and he's flushed red from laughing, but his eyes are bright. He waves at Derek from across the lunchroom, and Derek starts, flushes, and immediately turns back to his half-finished drawing as his ears turn red. When he looks up again, Stiles is spitting the patties into an empty plastic bag and Laura is making eyebrows at him from a few tables over. Derek flushes again and looks back to Erica, who senses his eyes on her and raises her eyebrows in question. He shrugs, and she shrugs, and she goes back to her apple and he turns back to his drawing until the bell rings. 

 

"I saw you making eyes at your  _boyfriend_ today at lunch," Laura sing-songs the moment he walks in the door, and Derek looks around in panic.

"Shut up, Laura," he hisses, and Cora and Laura roll their eyes in sync from their respective spots on the couch.

"Relax, Der-bear, you know Mom's cool with you being gay," Laura says, and Derek looks away, fiddling with the hem of his shirt. 

"I know," he mumbles, because he does. In theory. He grabs some juice from the fridge as Cora continues where Laura left off.

"Besides, you never talk to her anymore, not since like sophomore year. She'd probably be relieved to hear anything at all from you, these days."

Derek flushes, hearing the sound of the garage door opening. "Don't tell her about him, okay?" He insists, and they both roll their eyes again but Laura nods. Derek nods back, grabs his bag from where he slung it on the table, and disappears up the stairs just as his mom walks in the door.

 

The next day at lunch, he's already sitting when Stiles and his crowd walk in. Allison, Lydia, Jackson, and Boyd are sitting too - Erica and Boyd have already made their awkward, blushy eye-contact that they do every day - so it's just Scott and Isaac trailing him as he tells some story involving lots of gestures. Isaac accidentally makes eye contact and quickly looks away, avoiding the awkwardness of acknowledging your former best friend. Stiles catches Isaac quickly looking away and follows his eyes right back to Derek, who flushes and ducks his head, turning back to his book. It's  _1984_ today, because of English class, and he pretends to be engrossed in it until he hears the sound of chairs scraping at their table. _  
_

 

A week later in art class and something changes.

Erica and Derek always sit together in art class. The table behind them is where Isaac, Lydia, and Boyd sit, and Derek chose a spot with his back to them so he doesn't see Lydia's judgement or Isaac's quiet, awkward pity. Erica sits facing them so she can write  _Erica Marie Boyd_ on her paper while watching him. Derek draws charcoal or pencil in his sketchbook, portraits or scenes usually, and ignores everyone else, scowling when anyone except the teacher approaches him. 

He notices, of course, when a shadow covers their table a few minutes before the bell rings, and he looks up with his eyebrows already low on his face. He softens a little when he sees that it's Boyd, already blushing and looking only at Erica. He melts himself easily into his surroundings as Boyd stutters, "Um, hi, Erica."

God, she's blushing worse than he is, looking somewhere just to the left of his eyes. They're perfect for each other. "Hi," she mumbles, tucking her hair behind her ear.

Boyd swallows. Derek resists laughing, but barely. "I was wondering if - if maybe you wanted to sit with me at lunch today?"

Derek hears Lydia mutter, "God,  _finally_ ," and covers his laugh by coughing. 

Erica is just staring up at Boyd, her face red and her mouth parted. He kicks her lightly under the table and she starts. She glances at him and he nods - he knows she's worried about him sitting all alone, but he's not bothered and if it becomes a problem he'll just go back to sitting in the library. "Yes," Erica finally says, looking at him and smiling a little, and Boyd looks so relieved Derek is worried he might faint. "I'd like that."

Boyd nods, still blushing, and Erica nods too until he walks away. "God," she breathes, looking at him. Her eyes are far away and she's smiling, and she looks gorgeous like this, flushed and happy.

"Thank god," Derek teases, quiet enough that they won't be able to hear him, "I thought the sexual tension was going to kill me."

She goes crimson. "Derek!" she hisses, hitting him with her notebook, and he laughs himself softly into the sound of the bell ringing.

 

At lunch that day, it's different. Derek is not a stranger to sitting by himself - in middle school, he had one friend and Laura, and he used to drag Isaac to sit with her everyday so they weren't alone enough to get picked on. Freshman year, he and Laura had different lunches, so it was just Isaac and Derek sitting together until Kate happened. He used to sit at her table, feeling more invisible than he ever had before and avoiding Isaac's eyes across the room. After - after, he hid in the library during lunch, and when he came back sophomore year, Isaac was suddenly friends with Scott McCall and his crowd. They weren't classically "popular" - the only one of them who was any good at sports was Jackson,  and Lydia, Stiles, and Boyd were all math nerds - but they were all friendly and didn't seem to care what people thought of them enough that being friends with them was more desirable than any of the jocks. Derek spent most of sophomore year sitting alone until he made friends with Erica, and now, in the middle of junior year, he's worse off than he started.

He considers going to the library, but he imagines the look on the librarian's face if he were to come back (she gave him an honest-to-god thumbs up in the hall the first day in sophomore year he didn't eat in the library) and forces himself to sit at he and Erica's regular table, pulling an apple, a water, and his sketchbook out of his backpack. He looks over to Stiles' table, and sees that she's fitting in well; Boyd is leaning in and listening as she talks, and Allison is asking her a question from across the table, and she looks happy, which is the most important thing. He smiles to himself, and ignores the way Jennifer and her friends titter as they walk by him.

 

An hour after school, Stiles is leaning against Derek's car when he walks out of the art room. Derek pauses and debates going back inside, because this can't be good, but Stiles looks up and sees him, waving and calling out his name. Derek scowls, resists blushing out of sheer willpower, and stalks over to him. "Aren't you supposed to be at lacrosse?" he growls, but Stiles waves his hand in a dismissive gesture, unconcerned.

"Coach won't miss me," and Derek snorts, because he knows, he's seen Stiles play. Stiles' eyebrows rise, and Derek forces his face to settle back into his hallway-mask. "Can I help you with something?" he asks flatly, digging in his bag for his keys.

"Yeah. Look, I know Boyd like kidnapped your only friend - and thank god it happened too, those two were killing me - but that doesn't mean you have to sit alone."

Derek hears Jennifer's laugh across the parking lot, and his shoulders tense. "It's fine," Derek mumbles, digging farther looking for his keys. He wants to get out of here.

"Kate, oh my god, what are you doing back in Beacon Hills?" Jennifer shouts, and -  _shit_. Derek just accidentally dumped the entire contents of his bag at Stiles' feet. 

"Sorry," Derek says, ducking down without looking at him. He keeps his head low - and there are his keys, now, when it's too late - as he cleans up the mess of charcoal and drawing pens and notebooks. Knees appear in his vision, knobby and bare, and when he looks up Stiles is handing him his sketchbook. "It's okay, Derek," he says.

"I know, right? It's crazy, I just decided on a whirlwind that I missed this place, quit my job, and decided to move back! Isn't that great?" Kate's voice, raspy just like he remembered. God. He swallows as he stands, realizes Stiles is trying to talk to him.

"- and I know you've got the whole lone wolf serial killer glare thing going for you, but I don't see why that means you have to sit alone every day just because Boyd and Erica are finally getting some," Stiles finishes, Kate's tittering laugh echoing in the background. Derek's stomach is in knots. Suddenly, he distrusts Stiles open expression, doesn't believe his good intentions or the hand that's still holding Derek's sketchbook.

"It's fine, I told you," Derek snaps, and Stiles blinks. "I don't need your pity, and whatever -  _thing_ this is to you, I'm not interested, okay? Go find someone else to fool with whatever the hell kind of joke this is supposed to be." With that, he snatches his sketchbook - ignoring the flat shock on Stiles' face - and climbs into the car, slamming the door shut. He waits for Stiles to move out of the way before he tears away, but he's not fast enough to miss the ice-cold anger on Kate's face as he passes.

He swallows, and speeds the whole way home.

 

Derek doesn't wait to talk to Cora when he gets home, storming right past her up the stairs and throwing his bag on his bed. He heads into his bathroom and barely has the lights on before he throws up in the toilet. His phone is buzzing in his pocket, but he doesn't pull it out, sitting gasping on the cold linoleum. 

When Laura gets home half an hour later, he's still sitting next to the toilet, staring at the wall. She comes into his bathroom and hangs back in the doorway, looking in at him. Softly, she says, "Did you get my texts?"

He shakes his head.

"I saw Kate."

He says nothing. He doesn't look at her.

"Oh, Der-Bear," she says, and slides down on the floor next to him. She takes his hand and holds it, and they stay like that for a while, until Talia calls up that dinner is ready. "I can tell her you're sick," Laura offers, and Derek is struck with an unsteadying wave of affection for her. Never mind that they're twins, they're siblings in high school, they're not supposed to like each other. 

He shakes his head. "No, I can handle it."

He does, mostly. Dinner is terrible. He's quiet and Cora is loud and Laura is trying to awkwardly quell tension that isn't there, and his mother is watching him a lot of the time, but he makes it through well enough, and disappears soon after.

He draws darkly that night, trying to capture the shock on Stiles' face as he yelled at him, runs through a whole stick of charcoal on that drawing until he gives up, slumps on the bed and draws softer, from memory, Erica at lunch today and when Boyd asked her to sit by him, Laura when she laughs, the way Stiles smiled at him a few weeks ago. He falls asleep too late for the amount of sleep to be significant, but he wakes up feeling less shitty than he went to bed. 

 

He's normally late to school, but he rides with Laura and ends up getting there early for a change. He goes to his locker and dumps all of his textbooks, and he's looking for a spare writing pencil in the mess when he hears, "Hey! Sourwolf!" and looks up. Stiles is charging towards him, red in the face and pissed off, and Derek blinks. People are looking at him now, and he scowls at them until they avoid his eyes. When Derek is done glaring at them, Stiles is right in front of him, a little taller and with so much  _presence_  that Derek takes a step back. "Look, I don't know what the  _hell_ got your panties so twisted yesterday, but I was trying to be nice,  _asshole_."

Derek blinks. "I -"

"And _another_ thing, because I'm not done. What the hell kind of person do you think I am that I'd invite you to sit with us as a  _joke_? Do you think I get off on humiliating people? Do I seem like that kind of person to you?"

He seems to actually be waiting for an answer, his chest heaving as he looks at Derek, but all of Derek's words are gone. Feeling kind of stunned he says, "No, I - I voted for you for student council."

Stiles blinks, a vaguely confused expression crossing his face. Derek knows the feeling. He regroups more quickly than Derek does, which is expected. "Then what the  _fuck_ is your problem? If you didn't want to sit with us, you could have just  _said_ , instead of implying that we're all sadistic, cruel assholes. I'm a big boy you know, I could take it if you just didn't like me."

God, Derek is bad at this. He's always been the worst at words, especially under pressure (it was how Laura won all their arguments as a kid, until their mom caught on enough to intervene), but this seems important and he has to say _something._ "I don't dislike you," Derek says, and it isn't enough, or everything, but it has the righteous indignation melting off of Stiles' face, making him blink and step back out of Derek's face.

 "Then what's the issue?" Stiles asks, and he seems honestly curious now. Over Stiles' shoulder, Derek sees Jennifer watching them with narrowed eyes, and he swallows and looks away. Stiles catches his gaze and looks over his own shoulder, meets Jennifer's eyes and gives her a sarcastic, stiff little wave that has her looking away with a huff.

"Nothing," Derek mumbles, his eyebrows knitting together at he stares at his feet. "I'm sorry." 

"You know," Stiles says conversationally, and Derek looks up. His eyes are more assessing than his tone. "Erica and Isaac said you were pretty cool, underneath the eyebrows and the scowl. I never really believed the whole serial killer thing anyway, and most of the rumors seemed fairly bullshitty to me. I mean, what the hell kind of guy spends his time drawing and reading pretentious novels all the time and then goes home to beat people up and spit on puppies? It never made sense to me." Derek blinks. Since when are his books pretentious? And spitting on puppies? _Really?_ "You want to sit with us at lunch, Derek?"

Derek swallows. He's still not sure he trusts this - the last time something like this was offered to him with seemingly no strings attached was freshman year, and there were lots of strings and he still has issues because of it - but it doesn't seem important at the moment. What does seem important is Stiles looking at him with hope in his eyes, rocking a little on his heels. He's still waiting for an answer, so Derek takes a breath and gives him a tight smile. "Okay," he says, and Stiles - he fucking beams. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it!! Sorry for the lack of actual sterek romance, but it's to come. Once my long fic is finished, there will be more in this series. Read my long fic [here.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3563156/chapters/7848812) That one is in the canon-verse and a little more intense, also a WIP, so be warned  
> title is a song of the same name by Lorde
> 
> come talk to me on [tumblr!](http://allyaisbae.tumblr.com)


End file.
